Safety Spotlight: 'Not again'

It’s true that in 2012 an Iowa crop duster managed to disprove the adage that there are no new ways to crash an airplane by hitting power lines while chatting on his cellphone during a spray run. Still, the sequences leading to the vast majority of fatal general aviation accidents are depressingly familiar—and distressingly unnecessary. Disregarding a century’s worth of accumulated wisdom, pilots choose to roll the dice by cutting into fuel reserves, pushing into deteriorating weather, or yanking and banking at altitudes that leave no margin for error. Every year dozens of them lose.

You could regard it as natural selection if they were the only victims, but of course they’re not—and I’m not talking about the public image of GA. Casualties on the ground are blessedly rare, but often there are others in those airplanes. Frequently they’re the ones the pilot cares about most.

There were several reasons the preliminary report on a September 2016 accident caught my eye. One was the extremity of the behavior it described. A Super Cub replica on floats crashed into a residential neighborhood of Anchorage, Alaska, as its pilot did extremely steep turns at extremely low altitudes—witnesses estimated 60-plus degrees of bank at no more than 50 feet agl on the final pass. The airplane began to recover from the apparent stall just before impact; given a reasonable amount of elbow room, the pilot might have pulled it out.

AOPA Air Safety Institute statistician David Jack Kenny is a fixed-wing ATP with commercial privileges for helicopter. He took his first flight lesson at age 41.He narrowly missed both houses and pedestrians—but his dog, who he’d brought along for the ride, died with him in the wreck. Perhaps because I’ve devoted much of my own flying career to transporting rescue dogs, that fact hit me particularly hard. The dog had no inkling that his life would be imperiled by a knuckleheaded stunt. He just climbed aboard with his accustomed trust in the man who had always taken care of him.

That dog—and the bowl of petunias—came to mind again during the last week of December 2016. While probable cause isn’t likely to be determined before 2018 at the earliest, three fatal accidents in the course of five days bore all the hallmarks of attempts to continue flying VFR into instrument conditions. Eleven people died as a result. Two more were killed during an attempted instrument approach into below-minimums weather after dark, using a procedure not authorized at night.

The three people in the Cessna 182 that crashed in Tennessee were joining family members for a vacation. The pilot of the 182 that crashed in Washington was taking his fiancée and her two young grandchildren on a hop of just 60 nautical miles. The Piper Arrow that crashed with four fatalities in Iowa was headed to Nashville on New Year’s Eve. And the turboprop wrecked in the unauthorized approach was trying to make it back to its base at a residential airpark when a public-use airport 12 nautical miles away was reporting clear skies and good visibility.

In short, there was no good reason for any of these pilots to endanger the lives of their passengers—not that there ever is! And it’s a good bet most of those passengers were no better equipped to weigh those risks than the dog in Anchorage. Knowing only that they were placing their fates in the hands of a “licensed pilot,” they climbed aboard and buckled up with a trust as pure and naïve as any canine’s.

I don’t think it’s my training as a statistician that makes it hard to understand taking additional risks with passengers on board. My goal is always to avoid so much as scaring them (if humanly possible) so they’ll want to fly with me again. If that means we depart late or return early to avoid dicey conditions, so be it. I can understand wanting to demonstrate the value of a personal airplane (especially to a skeptical spouse), but it’s not worth venturing into the realm where strategy devolves into hope.

Reading every fresh report of trust betrayed, I wish those pilots could have talked to my mother first. When I was a new driver eager to build time shuttling my siblings around, she’d only give me the keys after a two-word reminder: “Precious cargo.”

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